Jeremy Paxman

That’s it, I have finished recording my very last University Challenge. Recordings of the current student series have already ended. I am as amazed as ever that everyone keeps the outcome secret for as long as they do, but I suppose Cicero’s old question ‘cui bono?’ will still do as an answer; it certainly seemed to do the trick when a few years ago, The Observer broke the code of omertà and childishly splashed the result of an upcoming contest across its pages like an off-his-head teenager’s graffiti.

For these recordings we were entertaining graduates old enough to know better than to respond positively to a producer’s invitation based on a Wikipedia list of ‘distinguished graduates’ they had seen somewhere or other. Though we made much of their anxiety, the collection of newspaper columnists, stand-up comedians and people doing proper jobs as professors of this or that were, without exception, delighted to be in a studio in rainswept Salford. It was a real pleasure to meet them. We used to make the questions easier for the old codgers, but this time they mostly seemed as tricky as the ones we put to the students.

The lucky winners and runners-up joined us for a celebratory glass afterwards, where to my great embarrassment, the production team and assorted technicians and bigwigs from the BBC thanked me for my role. One or two of these grandees I had even seen before. Denise, the sound recordist, gave me a very nice bottle and our lighting director Paul (who, inevitably, is known as the ‘Prince of Darkness’) disclosed that he, too, had done 29 years on the show and was also thinking of moving on.

So this is it: retirement in all its many facets of pleasure and terror. What is to be done with all the free time? I am lucky, like most of my generation, in not toiling in a coal mine, and hope to cling to my Saga gig for as long as the editor will have me.

I have also been lucky in gradually running down some of my other commitments, having abandoned several years ago the daily grind of trying to make sense of the latest tomfoolery that passes for government. Liz Truss would have driven Socrates to hemlock within a day of entering Downing Street.

‘I can do nothing about the everyday frustrations which mean if something goes wrong it’s your fault’

I can do nothing about the everyday frustrations of life which mean that every time something goes wrong it is your fault. This seems to me to be the default position of every computer-based service, so I was destined to never attend the autumn rugby international between England and South Africa. When I tried to buy tickets, the RFU computer demanded my password, which I have completely forgotten. I shall have to be content to watch it on television. But then, a lot of old age seems to consist of ‘being content to’.

But what happened next on the RFU website defied belief. ‘Please use forgotten details to retrieve password’ read the message. I screamed at the screen that I had forgotten the sodding password; ‘cretin’ must be on the list of unrecognised, banned words.

Instead, I plan to join a choir, to take a postgraduate degree in understanding Renaissance art and finally to finish the wine appreciation course that I began a year ago. I may even give drawing another bash.

It could still all go wrong; there is plenty of time. But we are fortunate in being the first generation in history that seems to have altered the terms of trade in our favour. With a modicum of good luck we may all have time to do all of these and to hang around being a nuisance for years to come. And with that Dr Pangloss was gone – a reference that has a University Challenge question written all over it. Those ‘old codgers’ best start googling…

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